On the other hand, I imagine that anyone working in the archaeology of coastal settlements is not too happy about the prospects, unless what they really wanted was a lateral move to marine archaeology...
Of course there's an element of luck, too, as well as the '49er effect: that is, the ones that get there first stand a better chance of getting rich. But if you get there early and have a good product, you have a chance of attaining the critical mass that attracts not only listeners but collaborators. Slashdot as a tech website is an example. Among blogs, Daily Kos would be another. And I would put the Skepticality podcast in that category, potentially: it is well produced (decent recording, excellent editing and pacing, smart format), intelligent, has likable hosts, and has started attracting some well-known interviewees like James Randi. It's here to stay, I'd bet.
The distinction between corporate and indie is less important, I think, than the question of how an excellent late-comer can crack the barrier of the existing hierarchy. (The one heartening thing is that firstcomers tend to drop off the top of the pyramid when people realize they're just not that good or interesting, witness Adam Curry's drop in the rankings.)
Or roll your own from a Project Gutenberg (or any other) text file. If you have a Mac, there are various text to speech programs available--for example, books2burn is designed for this.
So long as you don't mind listening to one of the funky Apple system voices for hours on end...!
I second that. For those who don't remember this classic Sung-in-Arabic-that-Sounds-Kind-of-Like-Swedish (if-you're-drunk-enough) song and subsquent music video, the original Flash animation and explanation are archived here.
My system for quite a few years has been to keep passwords in an encrypted file located somewhere that I can easily get to it whenever I have an Internet connection. I'm sure that's less secure than keeping it on a USB device. But the risk of someone hacking the file I consider to be much lower than the risk of losing the file (via system crash, user stupidity, or whatever), so that ability to have it backed up is crucial. And unless you are scrupulous enough to regularly back up a file on a USB device to another offline device that you will always have and not lose, I don't see that it's a better system, all things considered. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...
"In the next six months, we'll catch Google in terms of relevancy". --Steve
Balmer, 27 June 2005
"The U.S. military is 'sure' it will catch Osama bin Laden this year, perhaps
within months, a spokesman declared Thursday". --Associated
Press story, 30 January 2004
I'll be impressed when Microsoft provides save-as-XHTML and save-as-clean-XML options from Word that write human-readable files without oodles of proprietary namespaces, useless attributes, and structure that only a Philadelphia lawyer could love.
(I say this having just gone through my semi-annual search of third-party conversion software in the neverending quest to figure out a way to get from Word documents to rationally structured XML.)
Remember the first Usenet spammers, Canter and Siegel? Once they gained national notoriety and launched an Internet advertising business, their first client was a company that marketed "a health product, super-oxygenated water".
Re:XML Seems Cool
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
XML isn't really "useless", but keeping data in XML files is probably a bad idea. What if you mistype one character in one tag for instance? What does your document mean now?
This is sort of like saying that programming in C is a bad idea, because what happens if you mistype a function name, and your program refuses to run? That's what debuggers are for. Likewise, the XML world is full of open-source or low-cost schema-aware editors and validators. Minimally you should use an editor that knows which elements and attributes are legal while you're entering data. If you design a schema appropriately for your data, you can constrain data types with a great degree of precision.
Slashdot moderation is usually fair except when the topic is XML, in which case outrageous, trollish, and uninformed comments that would be shot down in any other topic area are judged "interesting" or "informative".
Yes, XML has been overhyped. Yes, it is used in many places where it's not appropriate. But it's completely unfair to tar an entire language and suite of associated technologies because of the way it's abused. Is Flash an inferior product because there are idiots who put loud, bloated Flash intros on their websites when a nice compact CSS-based splash page would do?
A lot of people (notably on Slashdot) have the notion that when it comes to data XML is verbose and redundant with existing data formats and programming languages, and that when it comes to text XML is overkill because good ol' ASCII is all you need. Well, if the only things in the world that ever needed archiving, searching, and retrieval were highly structured data and Usenet news posts those would be defensible opinions. But those aren't the only things in the world. There is a huge, huge amount of content that consists of heterogenous mixtures of strictly typed data, free-form data, and text in various languages (including the languages of mathematics, of music, of graphics...). As of 2005, there's no better format with which to store it and process it than XML.
Do a Google search on/'digital library' XML/ or try/XML site:loc.gov/ for example. And if you ever talk to anyone who's done serious programming for the kind of projects you'll find mentioned there, you'll discover they have skills that incommensurate with those of the people who put "XML" on their resume because they once used xsltproc to generate simple HTML output from a simple XSLT stylesheet. And believe it or not, some hiring officials are able to tell the difference. (Speaking as one who spent a good chunk of the last couple months looking at code samples submitted by applicants for one of those positions.)
Sorry, but I've had it with knee-jerk XML bashing.
The photos here reminded me of the first time I saw the Aurora Borealis, as a kid on vacation with family at Yellowstone National Park. We were staying at the Old Faithful Inn, and after dark wandered onto the porch to find a fairly impressive display of the lights in the northern sky. A woman near us pulled out her Instamatic camera (precursor to today's disposables, basically, fixed-focus cheapies) and started snapping flash pictures of the lights.
My parents did a good job of not laughing until she went back inside...
It was one of the few Debian packages that I held back at "stable" for a long time because new releases tended to break things for people. Hopefully with the new version upgrades will be smoother all around.
The existence of netatalk was the main reason why, three or so years ago, I donated an old PC of mine to my department and installed Linux on it--they were using (and still are!) an ancient Novell fileserver that the Windows machines could get to but that the Macs couldn't, and everyone was amazed when I set up a Linux box with Samba and netatalk and they could all share files on it.
Hmm, and the Piraha live in a tropical climate. Repeat the experiment in a freezer and I'll bet you'd find them doing floating-point arithmetic in their heads.
No, the sad fact is that every time there is a post involving XML on Slashdot, a surprising number of people post to say that XML, as far as they can see, is overhyped, and they'll take plain old ASCII, thank you. (Particularly when the discussion involves the format of online books.)
The best God Games are in books
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There's plenty of imagination of what the God-role might be in a computer game. I'm not a big fan of Andrew Greeley, but he did stake out this turf in The God Game a decade ago. Or, for a high metafictional take on a real-life role-playing game with a godlike director, there's John Fowles's The Magus.
And I suppose the best Death-of-God Game would have to be Lucky Wander Boy by D. B. Weiss.
Ever wondered where Mme. Abacha developed the wonderful rhetoric of her email letters to you promising riches? There is no better genre of retro advice manuals than that produced in Nigeria a generation or two ago. Be sure not to miss the classic My seven daughters are after young boys and How to study and write good letters, applications, compositions, telegrams, agreements, better sentences, important letters, speaking in public and teach yourself good English.
What I have always done is download Firefox, change the icon to the blue E, and rename the shortcut "Internet Explorer". I then tell them, "It's the new version of Internet Explorer, called Mozilla."
I have had no people complain or ask to have the "old" version back. In fact, the only thing I have heard is praise ("It's so fast", "I don't get pop-ups anymore", etc).
You know, if the Kerry campaign could figure out a way to adapt this strategy to replace GWB, we might have a pretty painless transition come November.
I'm not a violent person in real life, but back in the early days of spammers when I cared enough to post diatribes about them to Usenet, I used to have embarrassingly detailed daydreams about the treatment of spammers that I thought would make a good deterrent. They tended to involve graphic videotapes that would be distributed to media outlets. If there had been an organized anti-spammer Al Qaeda-like group back then, I would have been ripe for recruitment.
I do wonder, though, whether things would be different today if a couple of the early spammers had met with serious retribution instead of nothing worse than floods of unwanted magazine subscriptions ("Spam King" Jeff Slaton boasted he was building a rammed-earth house in Albuquerque using all the magazines that he was getting...)
Rektrutacja--I think the "Soviet Poland" phrase was not meant seriously, but as a humorous echo of the "Soviet Russia" jokes popularized by Russian emigré Yakov Smirnoff. (The whole premise of Smirnoff's career as a comedian in the USA was more or less undermined when the USSR broke apart.)
"UCSD" is clearly not an abbreviation of "University of California", so what's the problem?
Did you read the section of the Education Code that you linked to? "The name 'University of California' is the property of
the state. No person shall, without the permission of the Regents of
the University of California, use this name, or any abbreviation of
it or any name of which these words are a part" (emphasis mine). "The University of California, San Diego", of which "UCSD" is an abbreviation, is obviously a name of which the words "University of California" are a part.
My department of 5 people has been using PHProjekt to manage a combination of software development and publication tasks. Unfortunately, we've found that it's clunky enough that it's not being used effectively. Its lack of reminders and deadline enforcement is a problem. We're biting the bullet and shifting over to MS Project (even though in my case it will mean running VirtualPC on my Mac all the time).
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I imagine that anyone working in the archaeology of coastal settlements is not too happy about the prospects, unless what they really wanted was a lateral move to marine archaeology...
Of course there's an element of luck, too, as well as the '49er effect: that is, the ones that get there first stand a better chance of getting rich. But if you get there early and have a good product, you have a chance of attaining the critical mass that attracts not only listeners but collaborators. Slashdot as a tech website is an example. Among blogs, Daily Kos would be another. And I would put the Skepticality podcast in that category, potentially: it is well produced (decent recording, excellent editing and pacing, smart format), intelligent, has likable hosts, and has started attracting some well-known interviewees like James Randi. It's here to stay, I'd bet.
The distinction between corporate and indie is less important, I think, than the question of how an excellent late-comer can crack the barrier of the existing hierarchy. (The one heartening thing is that firstcomers tend to drop off the top of the pyramid when people realize they're just not that good or interesting, witness Adam Curry's drop in the rankings.)
Or roll your own from a Project Gutenberg (or any other) text file. If you have a Mac, there are various text to speech programs available--for example, books2burn is designed for this.
So long as you don't mind listening to one of the funky Apple system voices for hours on end...!
I second that. For those who don't remember this classic Sung-in-Arabic-that-Sounds-Kind-of-Like-Swedish (if-you're-drunk-enough) song and subsquent music video, the original Flash animation and explanation are archived here.
My system for quite a few years has been to keep passwords in an encrypted file located somewhere that I can easily get to it whenever I have an Internet connection. I'm sure that's less secure than keeping it on a USB device. But the risk of someone hacking the file I consider to be much lower than the risk of losing the file (via system crash, user stupidity, or whatever), so that ability to have it backed up is crucial. And unless you are scrupulous enough to regularly back up a file on a USB device to another offline device that you will always have and not lose, I don't see that it's a better system, all things considered. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...
"The U.S. military is 'sure' it will catch Osama bin Laden this year, perhaps within months, a spokesman declared Thursday". --Associated Press story, 30 January 2004
You forgot the ALA Conference! You forgot the ALA Conference!!
I'll be impressed when Microsoft provides save-as-XHTML and save-as-clean-XML options from Word that write human-readable files without oodles of proprietary namespaces, useless attributes, and structure that only a Philadelphia lawyer could love.
(I say this having just gone through my semi-annual search of third-party conversion software in the neverending quest to figure out a way to get from Word documents to rationally structured XML.)
Remember the first Usenet spammers, Canter and Siegel? Once they gained national notoriety and launched an Internet advertising business, their first client was a company that marketed "a health product, super-oxygenated water".
Yes, XML has been overhyped. Yes, it is used in many places where it's not appropriate. But it's completely unfair to tar an entire language and suite of associated technologies because of the way it's abused. Is Flash an inferior product because there are idiots who put loud, bloated Flash intros on their websites when a nice compact CSS-based splash page would do?
A lot of people (notably on Slashdot) have the notion that when it comes to data XML is verbose and redundant with existing data formats and programming languages, and that when it comes to text XML is overkill because good ol' ASCII is all you need. Well, if the only things in the world that ever needed archiving, searching, and retrieval were highly structured data and Usenet news posts those would be defensible opinions. But those aren't the only things in the world. There is a huge, huge amount of content that consists of heterogenous mixtures of strictly typed data, free-form data, and text in various languages (including the languages of mathematics, of music, of graphics...). As of 2005, there's no better format with which to store it and process it than XML.
Do a Google search on /'digital library' XML/ or try /XML site:loc.gov/ for example. And if you ever talk to anyone who's done serious programming for the kind of projects you'll find mentioned there, you'll discover they have skills that incommensurate with those of the people who put "XML" on their resume because they once used xsltproc to generate simple HTML output from a simple XSLT stylesheet. And believe it or not, some hiring officials are able to tell the difference. (Speaking as one who spent a good chunk of the last couple months looking at code samples submitted by applicants for one of those positions.)
Sorry, but I've had it with knee-jerk XML bashing.
The photos here reminded me of the first time I saw the Aurora Borealis, as a kid on vacation with family at Yellowstone National Park. We were staying at the Old Faithful Inn, and after dark wandered onto the porch to find a fairly impressive display of the lights in the northern sky. A woman near us pulled out her Instamatic camera (precursor to today's disposables, basically, fixed-focus cheapies) and started snapping flash pictures of the lights.
My parents did a good job of not laughing until she went back inside...
It was one of the few Debian packages that I held back at "stable" for a long time because new releases tended to break things for people. Hopefully with the new version upgrades will be smoother all around.
The existence of netatalk was the main reason why, three or so years ago, I donated an old PC of mine to my department and installed Linux on it--they were using (and still are!) an ancient Novell fileserver that the Windows machines could get to but that the Macs couldn't, and everyone was amazed when I set up a Linux box with Samba and netatalk and they could all share files on it.
Hmm, and the Piraha live in a tropical climate. Repeat the experiment in a freezer and I'll bet you'd find them doing floating-point arithmetic in their heads.
No, the sad fact is that every time there is a post involving XML on Slashdot, a surprising number of people post to say that XML, as far as they can see, is overhyped, and they'll take plain old ASCII, thank you. (Particularly when the discussion involves the format of online books.)
There's plenty of imagination of what the God-role might be in a computer game. I'm not a big fan of Andrew Greeley, but he did stake out this turf in The God Game a decade ago. Or, for a high metafictional take on a real-life role-playing game with a godlike director, there's John Fowles's The Magus. And I suppose the best Death-of-God Game would have to be Lucky Wander Boy by D. B. Weiss.
What I have always done is download Firefox, change the icon to the blue E, and rename the shortcut "Internet Explorer". I then tell them, "It's the new version of Internet Explorer, called Mozilla."
I have had no people complain or ask to have the "old" version back. In fact, the only thing I have heard is praise ("It's so fast", "I don't get pop-ups anymore", etc).
You know, if the Kerry campaign could figure out a way to adapt this strategy to replace GWB, we might have a pretty painless transition come November.
I do wonder, though, whether things would be different today if a couple of the early spammers had met with serious retribution instead of nothing worse than floods of unwanted magazine subscriptions ("Spam King" Jeff Slaton boasted he was building a rammed-earth house in Albuquerque using all the magazines that he was getting...)
Rektrutacja--I think the "Soviet Poland" phrase was not meant seriously, but as a humorous echo of the "Soviet Russia" jokes popularized by Russian emigré Yakov Smirnoff. (The whole premise of Smirnoff's career as a comedian in the USA was more or less undermined when the USSR broke apart.)
... 30 years ago, in their "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch.
The two lead teams are disabled at of 7:64 PST, and the 3D Shockwave animation just crashed my video system. It's going to be a loooong race...
And if you think Sanford Wallace was the original "Spam King", you need to read some even older stories.
My department of 5 people has been using PHProjekt to manage a combination of software development and publication tasks. Unfortunately, we've found that it's clunky enough that it's not being used effectively. Its lack of reminders and deadline enforcement is a problem. We're biting the bullet and shifting over to MS Project (even though in my case it will mean running VirtualPC on my Mac all the time).